by Duane Spurlock
By examining Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym we took a look at one of the authors and books that helped set the stage for pulp magazine writing in the 20th Century. It’s now appropriate to look at a work strikingly influenced -- perhaps inspired -- by Pym.
1931
“At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft, in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (New York: Dell Publishing, 1997). Originally published as a serial in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.
Joshi’s notes tell us Lovecraft wrote this short novel between January and March 1931. It was rejected by Weird Tales, and the author set it aside. Later it sold to Astounding Stories, in which it appeared in 1936. Apparently Lovecraft considered “At the Mountains of Madness” (AMM) to be one of his best works, but the editorial cuts made for the appearance in Astounding made the author see red. The version that appears in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft is based on the author’s original typescript, which resides in the John Hay Library at Brown University.
(One wonders about the reader reception to AMM in Astounding. It doesn’t have the rayguns and space ships and alien planet [that “Buck Rogers stuff”] elements I typically associate with Astounding’s fiction, although AMM’s Antarctic setting is certainly as exotic as any far-off planet that might appear within the magazine’s pages. Does anyone with an Astounding collection have letters columns to check in appropriate issues? Maybe no one commented on the story at all.)
AMM is a sequel to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. That it is a sequel isn’t explicitly clear until the last dozen or ten pages of the story, although the narrator (never named, but identified in “The Shadow Out of Time” [according to Joshi] as Professor William Dyer of the Miskatonic University geology department) early on mentions Poe’s novel. The association arises from the setting for Dyer’s story: Pym ends -- or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it suspends its action -- near Antarctica; Dyer leads a research expedition to that same southern continent. That the two stories are more tightly intertwined by the end of Lovecraft’s tale is made clear by a sound Dyer and his companion hear -- a strange, exotic call that narrator Pym mentions in Poe’s novel.
Lovecraft exploits this sound, and another element of Poe’s novel -- the author’s seeming ambivalence about this story -- to promote the horror within his own tale. To understand how Lovecraft does this, let’s look briefly at Poe’s novel.
The first two chapters of Pym were published in the January and February 1837 issues of The Southern Literary Messenger, for which Poe had served as editor. The opening passages have the feel of a typical nautical adventure tale -- a youngster wants to assert his independence from his family by stowing away on a whaling vessel for an adventurous trip at sea. After these two installments appeared, Poe apparently reconsidered his efforts, and the subsequent chapters take the form of a literary hoax.
The complete novel -- if by complete we mean the story as ended by its author -- then appeared in book form in 1838 from Harper Brothers. Here Poe’s intentional ambiguity or ambivalence about his longest piece of fiction comes clear -- although in a rather muddy fashion. In its book form, the tale opens with a preface ostensibly by Pym -- filled with “Defoesque posturing,” according to the Oxford University Press’ edition’s editor, J. Gerald Kennedy -- in which he describes E.A. Poe as simply an editor of Arthur Gordon Pym’s narrative of his “extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere.” Here he claims Poe published the first two chapters of his book in the Messenger “under the garb of fiction,” but letters from readers suggested that they saw the truth in the narrative despite its “air of fable” -- or so “Pym” claims.
To throw another glint of light on Poe’s seeming ambivalence regarding his own novel, it’s worth noting Claudia Kay Silverman’s statement at her web site on Pym, at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/frame.html, about John Cleves Symmes’ 1820 novel about a hollow Earth, Symzonia, which may have influenced or inspired Pym:
“The journey enacted in Symzonia, the journey to the interior of the earth, can be construed as a journey of anti-discovery. It is a journey to discover an emptiness.”
This discovery of emptiness (or anti-discovery) -- of finding nothing -- conflicts with our desire for closure in stories about exploration, where closure comes with discovery, or reaching a destination. The discovery of nothing -- like Pym’s ambiguous non-ending -- thwarts the reader’s expectation of discovery, of explanation or solution, of closure.
This lack of explanation or revelation harks back to Pym’s preface, in which he deliberately withholds information: Although he encounters gentlemen in Richmond, Virginia, “who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public" . . . “I had several reasons, however, for declining to do so, some of which were of a nature altogether private, and concern no person but myself, others not so much so.”
This leads us next to the “editor’s” Note at the novel’s end, which opens with the statement that Pym is dead, and so can’t provide the details that would resolve his narrative’s mysteries. But the reader is further frustrated in his desire for information by the statement, “The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press.” This is a fiction, of course; and not only does the reader not know the circumstances of Pym’s death, he learns no other details about that death -- essentially thrashing the reader with a frustrating literary pun by rendering Pym’s end doubly unresolved (Pym the novel, and Pym the narrator).
Back to Lovecraft. Early on in AMM he refers to Pym as a work of fiction, as AMM’s narrator, Professor Dyer, mentions having read the story. This sort of real-world detail lends verisimilitude to Lovecraft’s tale, particularly as AMM includes a full description of preparations for Dyer’s expeditions, an apparent requirement for any exploration narrative. For example, the detail Lovecraft uses to describe the construction of the airplanes to be used on the journey and the references to articles about actual expeditions give factual weight to his fiction and ground his readers in reality before he escorts them to the alien frights Dyer encounters in Antarctica. Jules Verne provided similarly detailed descriptions of his characters’ preparations and outfitting -- and especially of their conveyances -- in his novels. (Look, for example, at Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras [which was influenced by Pym, as discussed elsewhere on The Pulp Rack], or From the Earth to the Moon.) Poe, although he doesn’t give up so much on the vessels in Pym, also provides details about Pym’s provisioning in an “iron-bound box, such as is used sometimes for packing fine earthenware,” in which he stows away in the Grampus. However, Poe’s descriptions of Pym’s adventures in Chapters One and Two before leaving on the Grampus certainly ground the story -- at least in its beginnings -- in a world the reader can sense is “real.”
Likewise, Lovecraft continues to create verisimilitude in his descriptions of the environment and landscape the Dyer expedition experiences in Antarctica. This level of realistic description continues during Dyer’s exploration of the abandoned city and as he encounters the more fantastic elements of that setting. (Interestingly enough, in June 2007, reports were published on results of a study by North Carolina State University paleontologist Julia Clarke about fossils of giant penguins found in Peru -- remarkably similar in size to those penguins Lovecraft describes in AMM.) Lovecraft is clearly working with the conventions of the exploration narrative genre here, just as Verne does with his encyclopedic lists of marine life in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the geological and subterranean descriptions in Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Poe also lends the weight of a simulated reality to Pym in the way he devotes space to detailing the landscape of the uncharted island, Tsalal, on which Pym and Dirk Peters are marooned -- particularly the carved figures of the chasm investigated by the two sailors. The precise descriptions given in the body of the narrative are followed in the editorial Note at the novel’s end by an explanation -- although unsatisfying in the way it fails to clear up any mystery -- of the alphabetic nature of the carved figures’ shapes. These touches of verisimilitude serve to amplify the mystery of Pym’s ending.
Lovecraft exploits this teetering balance between verisimilitude and fiction in the last passages of AMM. The “reality” of Dyer’s world in AMM bursts when he hears the strange, exotic call that narrator Pym mentions in Poe’s novel. At that point, the novel Pym tears through that veil separating fiction from Dyer’s real world, and Pym the hoax/novel becomes Pym the true narrative for Dyer. As Dyer’s horror is revealed, Lovecraft’s reader feels a polar chill down his neck.
copyright Duane Spurlock
Links:
You can find The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi, at Amazon.com. Click here.
A related book, Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica, by John A. Long is also available there. Click here.
You can visit Claudia Kay Silverman’s web site on Pym by clicking here.
Learn more about the Transantarctic Mountains at the Antarctic Connection site...
...and at the Geosciences pages of the University of Arizona...
...and find out about their mysteries revealed, according to Science Daily.
In “Clues Found in Mystery of Antarctic Mountain Formation,” H.P. Lovecraft gets a mention in this LiveScience.com essay.
You can go there too, thanks to the Adventure Network. Watch out for the giant penguins!
Archives of The Southern Literary Messenger, including the issues in which Poe's novel appeared, are available at the University of Michigan.
Other articles of related interest at The Pulp Rack:
Edgar Allan Poe and the Road to Pulp Fiction
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras: Verne Lays the Foundation for Fictional Pulp Adventures to Foreign Lands
Posted by ds at August 31, 2007 07:38 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://pulprack.com/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/59
